Marcus Berkmann on cricketing books

The writer and cricket book connoisseur Marcus BerkmanPhoto: Andrew Crowley

By Marcus Berkmann

12:00PM BST 08 Jun 2013

One reason for having far too many cricket books is that there’s always something warm and comforting to read when the going gets tough. I can’t tell you how many times I have passed a rainy afternoon leafing through Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy (1985), in which the planet-brained former England skipper (with his legendary “degree in people”) both shows and tells you how it is done. When I am standing at mid-off as one of our tubby trundlers is pummelled to all parts of the ground, I try to remember the sage words of Brearley, and inevitably fail.

Another book I’m repeatedly drawn back to is Peter Oborne’s Basil D’Oliveira (2004), an elegant and quietly passionate retelling of the D’Oliveira affair. It’s a model of political writing, all the more effective for its extreme reasonableness. My favourite recent biography was Leo McKinstry’s Geoff Boycott (2000), which rehabilitated the old moaner when his reputation had been rather battered by circumstance.

Cricketing memoirs can be pretty gruelling experiences – if the pallid prose doesn’t get you down, the pranks and nicknames surely will – but Marcus Trescothick’s Coming Back to Me (2008) was a chillingly matter-of-fact account of his problems with depression, which abbreviated what should have been a glorious international career. And among the tsunami of supposedly amusing cricket books, which I’m afraid I helped start, Michael Simkins’s The Last Flannelled Fool (2011) stands out for the quality of its jokes and its unaffected amiability.